Anthologies Evolved

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When I was 16 or 17, it felt like Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather were my own personal discoveries. I had read through all of Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and T.C. Boyle after discovering their books and then working steadily through their bodies of work until there was nothing left to read. (And it’s amazing to think about how much time I had to read – time that I set aside for reading – back in those days.)

Empty-handed, a self-taught reader as yet unaware of many literary greats, I turned to anthologies. They were plentiful at used bookstores and I was already enamored of the form thanks to the New Yorkers lying around the house and to my adolescent thoughts of becoming a writer. What I quickly realized is that these books could open me up to a new world (almost the whole world, really) of literature. Delightful little tomes like A Pocket Book of Short Stories packed an incredible punch, introducing me to the likes of Balzac, Chekhov, Ring Lardner, Somerset Maugham, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and Cather – the table of contents is a chronicle of the weight of my discoveries. These discoveries would be made to seem mundane in college when I was instructed in the importance and context of these writers’ bodies of work, but discovering them first, in these beat up, little pocket paperbacks, bought for a dollar or two, was a revelation. Looking through all the tables of contents at the amazing, no frills “Miscellaneous Anthologies” site is like a walk down memory lane, not to mention an unparalleled catalog of the highlights of the form.

I ended up collecting quite a few of these anthologies, which I suspect are still ferreted around my parents house, as I can’t seem to find any on my bookshelves now. As my reading horizons broadened, I saw that these anthologies were nearing extinction, brought on by the combined declining market fortunes of both short stories and the declining prevalence of pocket-sized (or mass market) editions of literary fiction.

Nowadays, most short fiction anthologies you’ll see fall into three categories: academic (Norton, et al), yearly series (e.g. Best American and O. Henry Prize), and thematic. The latter two categories more and more have become known for the involvement of “celebrity” editors, typically big name authors who can grab a little press for the books. For example, Best American was edited by Stephen King in 2007 and Ann Patchettin 2006.

Likewise, celebrity editors are at the helm of a pair of themed anthologies already released this year. Jeffrey Eugenides has put together My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro. Of course, who’s ever seen a contemporary short story that plays out like a fairy tale? As Eugenides told NPR, “I started to realize that not only the love stories that I liked, but actually the love stories that everybody liked, had a certain bittersweet quality to them. The stories in this collection are by no means tragic, but in order to even get to a measure of happiness, the characters usually have to go through a lot of difficulty.” That sounds about right.

The Book of Other People, Zadie Smith’s anthology effort, is even more “low concept” (not necessarily a bad thing) than Eugenides’s. We are told her only instruction to her contributors – which include the likes of David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, and a generous sampling of the McSweeney’s set – was to “make somebody up.” USA Todayquips “just when you’re ready to howl in frustration at the anthologification of the book world – I’ve seen the best minds of my generation, live blogging about recipes that inspire them – along comes The Book of Other People,” but ultimately the verdict is that the book has flashes of goodness, as is echoed by the Washington Post: “Variety — in approach, style and, in some cases, quality — is certainly on display here.”

At the very least, there’s much to applaud in the creativity of Eugenides and Smith in compiling these books, and, for that matter, in the yearly anthologies for insisting by their very existence that the year’s “best” short story is something that matters. However, the idea of carrying a varied compendium of literary goodness in one’s pocket appears to have gone by the wayside, consigned to the dusty shelves of second-hand shops. For those in the know, a treasure trove of short fiction is there for the taking.

How could I go on when human life begins and ends? How could I go on with such a clear idea of the finiteness of existence? How could I do something as simple as brushing my teeth and climbing into bed in a cool, dark room knowing that babies are born and people die?

“Why is Helen Gurley Brown trending?” a confused man in San Francisco recently tweeted. The answer is Lena Dunham, who has put HGB back in the spotlight again, with the publication of her memoir/self-help manual, Not That Kind of Girl.
Anyone who has read or simply read about Dunham’s book probably knows that she was inspired by Brown’s 1982 bestseller, Having It All, which she bought for 65 cents at a thrift store in Ohio, thinking it would be “a decorative joke, something for my shelf of kitschy trophies.”
As it happened, the book became an unlikely lifeline. A student at Oberlin at the time, Lena inhaled Helen’s recipes for success (and probably a fair amount of dust), with some reservations. “Most of her advice . . . is absolutely bananas,” Dunham writes in her introduction to Not That Kind of Girl. “But despite her demented theories, which jibe not even a little bit with my distinctly feminist upbringing, I appreciate the way Helen shares her own embarrassing, acne-ridden history in an attempt to say, Look, happiness and satisfaction can happen to anyone.”
As someone who has been working on a book about Helen Gurley Brown for the past few years, I’m thrilled to see her name in the press again, and I think it’s great that Dunham is tipping her hat to Brown in her own memoir, which features a similar structure as Having It All (both books are divided into themed sections), a photo of the author in a classic ’80s power pose, and the line, “I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all.”
I, too, own a copy of Having It All. When I read Dunham’s description of her thrift-store find, which came with a stranger’s inscription, I smiled in recognition . . . My pre-loved copy of the book came via Amazon, with a slight scent of mildew, dog-eared pages, and an ancient, discolored photograph that fell out as soon as I opened it. I do not know the mustached, mostly naked, overly tanned man pictured in the photo. I only know that whoever took the photo used too much flash and must have thought that her boyfriend/lover looked pretty damn sexy posing in a bathroom doorway wearing his tightest black banana-hammock with brown cowboy boots and a thin gold chain. As long as I own this copy of Having It All, he will continue to live among its pages, along with some of Helen Gurley Brown’s best and worst advice. They simply belong together.
Not That Kind of Girl and Having It All belong together, too, in the relatively small canon of cheeky memoir/self-help-books-written-for-women-by-women. I understand why, in press interviews and public talks, Dunham keeps referencing Brown’s guide for attracting “love, success, sex, money, even if you’re starting with nothing.”
Granted, Dunham hardly started with nothing: The daughter of artists, she grew up in Soho and attended the prestigious Saint Anne’s School in Brooklyn, before studying creative writing at Oberlin. Brown’s childhood was far less comfy. Born in the tiny town of Green Forest, Arkansas, she was just a girl when her father died in an elevator accident, forcing her grieving mother to uproot the family to Los Angeles, where Helen’s older sister was diagnosed with polio. I’m guessing that Dunham probably could afford not to work. Helen didn’t have a choice. She worked her way through 17 secretarial jobs before landing the career (and the husband) of her dreams.
The story of Helen Gurley Brown is ultimately one about the power of will, and I understand why, as a college student, Dunham gravitated toward Helen’s belief that, as the Girls creator put it, “a powerful, confident, and yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born.” (See: Having It All, Chapter II, “How to ‘Mouseburger’ Your Way to the Top.”)
But I still think that Lena is spotlighting the wrong book.
The book that she should be talking about—that we all should be talking about, at least those of us who are talking about Lena Dunham and Helen Gurley Brown—is Sex and the Single Girl, which came out 20 years before Having It All, and changed the way people talked about sex (nice girls had premarital sex, too!), paving the way for shows like Sex and the City and Girls. (Props to Marisa Meltzer who made the connection at Yahoo! Style.)
Life isn’t a college syllabus, and it’s not Dunham’s job to talk about a book that didn’t speak to her, or that she may not have read yet. But from a critical perspective, talking about Having It All without mentioning Sex and the Single Girl is kind of like talking about How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong’s follow-up to Fear of Flying, without mentioning Fear of Flying.
Brown published Having It All when she was 60. She published Sex and the Single Girl when she was 40 and much closer to her experiences as a single woman working in advertising and dating around. She married the Hollywood producer David Brown at 37, considered spinster-age at the time. “I am not beautiful, or even pretty. I once had the world’s worst case of acne. I am not bosomy or brilliant. I grew up in a small town. I didn’t go to college. My family was, and is, desperately poor . . . But I don’t think it’s a miracle that I married my husband,” she began, before launching into her if-I-can-do-it-you-can-too spiel for how to lead a “rich, full life” as a single woman.
“Here is what it doesn’t take. Great beauty,” she continued. “What you do have to do is work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up.”
Sex and the Single Girl became an instant bestseller, with chapters giving women advice on where to meet men and how to have an affair from beginning to end. Yes, some of the advice was beyond ridiculous. Want to get a man’s attention? “Paint your car hot orange . . . or shocking pink.” Better yet: “Carry a controversial book at all times—like Karl Marx’sDas Kapital or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s a perfectly simple way of saying, ‘I’m open to conversation,’ without having to start one.”
But Brown also dispensed practical, often wise advice to her readers on how to start a career, how to save money, how to find an apartment, and how to embrace their own sexuality, flaws and all. “What is a sexy woman? Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex,” she wrote in a chapter called “How to Be Sexy.” “Being sexy means that you accept yourself as a woman . . . with all the functions of a woman . . . Being sexy means that you accept all the parts of your body as worthy and lovable.”
What a concept! It’s hard to say what Helen Gurley Brown would have made of Lena Dunham and her nude scenes in Girls—in another chapter, she told readers that if they wanted to find a man, “Your figure can’t harbor an ounce of baby fat”—but their message of self-acceptance is similar.
Like so many books that delve into the subject of sex and have been written by women, Brown’s book was a sensation and a shock. After reading the manuscript, her own mother was appalled and recommended putting off publication. Would her book get a lot of publicity? Sure, she said, but then again so would rape or murder!*
In The San Francisco Examiner, one furious male reader called Helen Gurley Brown’s message in Sex and the Single Girl “a libel against womanhood” that threatened the chastity of the nation’s girls. “The breaking down of moral values . . . which this book indirectly advocates is leading Western civilization into a decline,” he fumed.
Fifty years later, I read Sex and the Single Girl for the first time, at the age of 34. I know it was groundbreaking at the time, but the chapters about sex seemed tame; hardly shocking to someone who was still wearing skorts and Scrunchies when Madonna writhed on a bed in a cone bra and sang about being touched for the very first time.
Admittedly, I had a similar reaction when I read Fear of Flying, a book that I now count among my favorites of all time. The “zipless fuck” doesn’t seem quite so scandalous when your mother keeps asking you if you’ve “gotten to that part yet.”
Everyone said these books were about sex, and they were, but they are also about so much more. Sex and the Single Girl, Fear of Flying, Girls . . . as different as these works are in many ways, they are all about young women learning how to be alone with themselves, how to develop themselves, and how to take care of themselves; hard and often harrowing work that, preferably, happens before finding a partner. “When you accept yourself, with all your foibles, you will be able to accept other people too,” Brown wrote. “And you and they will be happier to be near you.”
That’s the message that Dunham is trying to get across, too, and I think she succeeds. I’ve read more than a few reviews in which critics repeat some version of the line, “I read Lena Dunham’s new book. I learned nothing about Lena Dunham,” suggesting that she is putting on a persona that has little in common with the “real” Lena. Really? I felt I learned so much about her, but also about her family, her fears. I was particularly moved by Dunham’s portrait of her younger sister Grace, who used to crawl into her bed as a small child and had “the comforting, sleep-inducing properties of a hot-water bottle or a cat.” (When Dunham was writing her book, Grace was graduating college. “She’s emerged as a surprising, strange adult,” Lena says, sounding more like her mother than her sister.)
Reading about her penchant for “bed-sharing” that continued into college, I remembered girls I knew in college who went to similar lengths to avoid being alone with themselves. Her experiences as a girl growing into a woman, despite being so different from mine, were also deeply familiar. I found her memoir to be personal and unflinching, funny and at times profound. But not everyone did.
In The Guardian, book critic Hadley Freemansuggested that Dunham’s memoir be filed in a new genre of writing called “clit lit,” “books by young women writing about what is usually described as ‘all their flaws,’ which means everything that happens in their vaginas, from masturbation to menstruation, from sex to cystitis,” writes Freeman, who, at a certain point, began counting the number of times that Dunham uses the word “vagina.” She stopped when she reached 25.“ There’s sexual honesty, and then there’s just sticking your head up your vagina.”
Maybe Freeman is just trying to be funny, I don’t know. I do know that Dunham uses the word “vagina” when describing the pain she felt after being raped by a guy she knew in college and before going to see her mother’s doctor, who, upon examining her, acknowledged that, “It must have been pretty rough.”
Dunham also uses the words “vagina” and “uterus” liberally in a chapter recounting the severe stinging sensation in her crotch that sent her to her gynecologist, who diagnosed her with classic endometriosis, a disorder of the uterus that can lead to problems conceiving children. “I’m afraid that I’m infertile,” she says later in the book.
Are women writers not supposed to use the word “vagina” when discussing such subjects? Or is the problem simply discussing the subjects themselves? As for the writer at New York’s “Vulture” who, weighing in on Hannah Horvath’s nakedness on Girls, said not to apply the word “brave” to Dunham because, as he put it, “she’s not a rape victim, she is a writer-actor-director who is exceptionally well compensated both financially and in the artist’s capital of choice—attention,” maybe you should read the chapter in Dunham’s book called “Barry.” (Also, forgetting Dunham for a second, how could you assume to know this kind of personal history about anyone? )
A lot has happened since 1962 when Sex and the Single Girl came out. Lena is able to write about subjects that Helen wasn’t, including what constitutes “rape.” (In an early draft of Sex and the Office*, Brown’s 1964 sequel to Sex and the Single Girl, she included a vignette called “Rape—More or Less,” recounting one woman’s experience of being attacked by a man she knew from work. The term “date rape” didn’t exist yet, and the story never made it to her final draft.) And yet, as two women who wrote memoir-manuals more than a half a century apart, they have been treated very similarly in the press. They weren’t honest enough. They were too honest—narcissistic navel-gazers.
“I’m an unreliable narrator,” Lena writes, before recounting the story of her rape, an episode that she told differently earlier in the book.
Like people, stories change. It doesn’t mean that they’re not true. Any memoir is an exercise in reconstructing memory. Every narrator is flawed. It’s not that Dunham is more flawed than anyone else. As was the case with Helen Gurley Brown, she is just more willing to look at her flaws, to write about them—and in the process, to rewrite herself.
Like stories, people change. It doesn’t mean they’re “not real,” a popular accusation that critics have been hurling at Dunham as of late.
“How much is Dunham inhabiting a persona—in effect wearing a mask made from her own face?” New Statesmen critic Helen Lewis asked recently. “Her whole life is a performance art piece where she plays a noxious brat with great skill . . . Reading this book, you realise that Lena Dunham has been playing ‘Lena Dunham’ for a long time. She is not real.”
This just seems goofy to me. We all have our public/private faces. To some degree, we are all performers in the daily dramas of our own lives. We are all unreliable narrators of our own stories. We are all editors who choose which truths to reveal, and which to tweak or cut out altogether.
I’ve been remembering a story about Helen’s teenage cousin, Lou, who visited her in the Pacific Palisades shortly after Sex and the Single Girl came out. When Lou stayed with Helen and David in 1962, copies of the book were still in boxes, stacked in the den. One day, she asked Helen for her own copy of Sex and the Single Girl.
Lou stayed up all night reading. She was riveted. But she couldn’t help but wonder if Helen really believed everything she had written about life as a single girl—how it’s OK to sleep with guys before you get married, or have affairs with married men.
“Do you really believe that?” Lou asked Helen the next morning.
“Absolutely,” Helen said. “I believe the things I said. I just didn’t talk about how lonely it can be.”
As Dunham continues her book tour, I hope someone raises the question that Helen’s cousin asked her all those years ago. Do you believe everything you wrote?
Who knows how she would answer . . . But no one can accuse her of not talking about how lonely it can be.
*From the Helen Gurley Brown Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

Maybe it’s best to begin in 2007, with an article in the New York Times about a “new, free communications service called Twitter.” It’s one of those delightful Times tech pieces that looks so, well, ancient as it matter-of-factly chronicles a digital trend that’s become commonplace, even ubiquitous, in a relatively short space of years. It was published a few weeks after that year’s SXSWi festival, during which Twitter (age: 1) was the big hit. The takeaway quote is from science fiction writer Bruce Sterling: “Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite The Iliad.”
Let’s look now, then, at Twitter (age: 8). We’ve obviously heard Sterling’s sort of derision plenty in the past decade (I’m contractually obligated to mention Jonathan Franzen here: it starts with his “ultimate irresponsible medium” comments and goes on (and on) from there) and we certainly still hear it today. But it feels a little useless to keep banging on about whether we should use Twitter: it’s so deeply interwoven into the fabrics of many of our personal and professional lives that the question feels a step out-of-date. Twitter is a medium now, irresponsible or not, and divorced from moral proclamations, it’s much more interesting to see how it’s being used. And whether, a thousand internet lifetimes since it made its debut in Austin, we’re still just as unlikely to fire up the CB radio and hear some guy recite The Iliad.
Perhaps the question will be answered by this year's #TwitterFiction Festival (age: 3). It begins today, and it’s a co-production of the social network itself and some stalwarts of the analog book world, Penguin Random House and the Association of American Publishers. The pull quote: “The platform is a powerful tool for more than sharing news and telling the realities of everyday life. It’s a place where fiction thrives.” The cynical bit of me would take the opportunity to say, “Yes, fictions certainly do thrive on Twitter” — I think of all the disappointments of those unfurling hoaxes, fake things that turned out even faker, @Horse_ebooks and @GSElevator and that guy who “confronted” that awful woman on a pre-Thanksgiving flight a few months back. Or worse, actual misinformation, news misrepresented or outright misreported, for speed or, in rarer cases, with malicious intent. But there is good on Twitter, certainly, and beyond connections and communication, people are testing things out. Jokes hit big; poetry thrives; satire, in the form of the parody account, never seems to get old.
But then there’s fiction — and I am not completely convinced that it’s “thriving” on Twitter yet, but it’s certainly evolving well beyond the “experimental” stunt, and that’s exciting. One could argue that parody accounts are a mode of fiction — the #TwitterFiction Festival does, along with “Images/Vine,” amongst other categories — but I’m more interested in the ways that traditional written narratives can work with — and succeed within — the form. One of the earliest high-profile stories delivered via tweets was Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Characters” for Electric Literature in 2009. And then, three years later, the Twitter story a lot of us are most likely to cite: Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box,” in the 2012 (science) fiction issue of The New Yorker. That one was tweeted by The New Yorker fiction department in installments at announced times, much like the Moody story, but was also published in a linear format in the magazine itself. (The full disclosure here was that I had the miserable task of turning the print story to a web one — that was my role in the digital production department there for several years. Words can’t express how silly it felt wrangling tweets laid out in print into a non-Twitter — yet still digital — format.)
A smile is like a door that is both open and closed.
— New Yorker Fiction (@NYerFiction) June 3, 2012
Do either transcend gimmickry? Well, there are interesting things to look at with both of them. Moody told the Wall Street Journal that he composed his story in tweet-like spurts in the first place: “I wanted to try to write something very up-to-the-minute, that made use of the Twitter form, instead of writing something in the ordinary way and just carving it up into 140 character chunks (which is cheating, I think). The plot followed naturally upon this wish.” He likely faced the challenge of the economy of characters that plagues overly-wordy people like me every time we try to tweet, and Electric Lit praised him for the result, saying that, “The Twitter story helps to highlight the extreme attention to language a great short story writer is likely to pay.” Egan also gave herself constraints, but paradoxically, she drafted her digital story on paper — an image of her notebook shows sentences scribbled into wireframe-like grids. By way of introduction to the project, she cites a few different things she was trying to experiment with, the last of which was “serialization” on Twitter: “This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one — because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters.” The cellphone novel, which emerged in Japan and continues to flourish both in and outside of East Asia, is now more than a decade old. Twitter, of course, originated from SMS messaging — it’s the reason for the character limit — and relinking these forms gives the conception of the story even more cohesion.
There’s no single correct way to use any social media platform. But for me, despite some of the successful elements of these stories, there’s just something about them feels...off. It’s in the delivery, not in the writing itself, because for me and for many on Twitter, the platform is more organic than this: there’s a spontaneity to its rhythms, to the memes and the quick exchanges, the truest expression of “viral,” for better or worse. If you follow a fair number of relatively active users, it often feels as though every tweet you manage to catch is a feat of pure chance: you switch tabs and navigate back a minute later and it’s “35 new Tweets,” and they unscroll in one enormous deluge, and then another pops in, and another. If you’re not on Twitter or have bad feelings about it, I’m likely not selling it to you here. But it’s sometimes that pure chance that’s so bewitching — some little gem that you just happen to catch can feel almost serendipitous.
All of this is compounded by the strange, somewhat warped sense of time in the digital age. I’ve been acutely aware of my five-hour displacement since moving across the ocean, and it’s more noticeable on Twitter than on other social media platforms — the list of accounts I follow is so American-centered (really even so East Coast-centered) that my feed is sparse and plodding for most of the business day — it’s lively in my late afternoon, and seems to heat up as I’m going to bed. I see the world unfolding in real time — but in someone else’s time. This has yet to stop feeling weird, and often a bit alienating. So I’ve been working to become a bit more active on social media here in my time-displacement, reaching out across a chasm that feels like it can be sewn up, at least a little bit, one tweet at a time. Then one afternoon in early January, I started to notice something curious happening on my Twitter feed. A series of seemingly — bafflingly! — connected retweets were popping up, a few of them from people I know but most of them from strangers, and they appeared to be telling a story.
. . . to the subway, I saw a man on the ground. He sat on the sidewalk, under trees, with his feet out to the quiet street.
— rünty reader (@runtyreader) January 8, 2014
The retweeter was Teju Cole, and the tweets told the story of a man collapsed on the ground, and a bystander who tries to help him. For one foolish moment, I believed that this was some totally miraculous game of exquisite corpse — that Cole was somehow curating a crowdsourced story that was being spun by a talented group of people on the spot. I later learned it was actually the exact opposite: he had used the crowd to tell a story — entitled “Hafiz” — that he had drafted beforehand. He told the Times that the piece was “a creative cousin to works like Shelley Jackson’s ‘Skin,’ a 2,095-word story that was told one tattooed word at a time on the bodies of 2,095 volunteers.” A retweet is nothing more than a single click — obviously nothing so extreme as a tattoo — but it is a curious device in itself, one Cole was interested in exploring. “I was fascinated by how clean a retweet can be, how you can make someone else present on your timeline,” he said. “This is usually a cause for anxiety (an anxiety people express with the plea ‘retweets are not endorsements’), but I thought it could also be an occasion for grace, for doing something unusual together.”
One of the participants was actually fellow Millions staffer Mark O’Connell, and I got in touch to ask about, as he put it, “the nuts and bolts.” “Like you, I was watching it unfold on my timeline for a while anyway and was really interested in what he was doing,” Mark told me. “He sent me a DM asking if I’d participate by tweeting a line he’d written, which I was totally happy to do, because it was cool to be a part of something clever and innovative like that.”
"How did he get into that position?" "He lay down there." "Lay how? Did he bang his head?" "He lay down there like someone going to sleep."
— Mark O'Connell (@mrkocnnll) January 8, 2014
Upon my further request, Mark got a bit more analytical, and he picked up on what Cole stated outright that he was going for — the disruption of a retweet on a timeline:
I think one of the reasons it worked as well as it did was that it actually used the medium to do something odd and original that could only really arise in that medium...I had a sense of the experience of my Twitter timeline being interrupted or unsettled in some quite interesting way. I remember noticing the retweets, and feeling that there was something that set them apart from everything else in my timeline — some quality of out-of-placeness that was more than just the ordinary out-of-placeness of retweets. I guess what I’m trying to get at is the sense that the story, or narrative, felt like an artfully estranging intrusion into a particular and familiar context. I think the ephemerality you mention is pretty crucial too; like, what I thought was maybe most interesting about it was the relationship between the initial appearances of these (for want of a better word) utterances in the timeline – that fragmentariness – and then the coming together of those fragments into a whole once you realized what was going on, and pursued them to their source – or maybe destination? But basically it was just gratifying and exciting to see the fragmentary experience of Twitter being turned to artistic account in that sort of way.
A few weeks later, we watched Cole playing with immediacy in real time, retweeting random peoples’ tweets with certain phrases in batches — they were collected later, as “A Ghazal In This Moment” and “A Ghazal For Now,” amongst others. There’s something crucial that’s lost when you look at them after the fact, though; this is all performance art, in a way, and the real coup is to see him in the act — in this moment, as it were.
But we can’t spend all day glued to our feeds. The Egan story can be revisited now and read in its entirety, though I found it strangely hard to find — The New Yorker’s put it back behind the paywall, so I wound up scrolling through two years of @NYerFiction tweets to find them. But if it’s simply a story split into pieces, I feel like the novelty of putting it up on Twitter has worn off — though it remains an interesting exercise, paring down character counts to refine language.
The #TwitterFiction Festival runs for four days, and while many (if not all?) of the participants appear to be pre-scheduled, that doesn’t preclude some spontaneity — and perhaps they’ve even got a few secret tricks planned. They’ve got a great and varied line-up on board, from Emma Straub to Alexander McCall-Smith, and they’ve been teasing at a variety of different approaches for weeks. Will they break any new ground? The surest way to tell is to watch your Twitter feed. All tweets may be archived forever in the Library of Congress, but if past Twitter fiction experiments are any indicator, the best way to feel a tweet’s full impact is to catch it just as your feed drops down and the notification pops up: “1 new Tweet.”

In the mid 1980’s, Italo Calvino began to think about the approaching millennium. It was still a decade and a half away, but the Italian writer had been invited to give a series of lectures at Harvard University and believing he needed a bigger theme to guide his lectures he chose "Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” which would be collected in a book by the same name. On the eve of his departure for the United States and with five memos written, he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the front of the collection his wife later published is a list of the six memos in Calvino’s handwriting, though the sixth and final is faint, as if someone had attempted to erase it. I have read the book a handful of times since it was assigned to me in an MFA course a couple years ago and this opening page remains my favorite, the faded letters like an invitation to finish the list for him, as if the sixth memo could (and should) be almost anything.
Each memo is intended to illuminate a value that Calvino saw in literature and address how it will function within literature in the new millennium. The five memos Calvino wrote cover lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. The final lecture would have been on consistency. I was fifteen the night the Y2K world meltdown didn’t happen, so I’m not quite a child of the new millennium, but a child of the moment just before, the same moment in which Calvino began his memos. I can remember a time before the proliferation of computers, when I had to do the majority of my teenage gossiping tied to the kitchen wall by a long curling phone cord. So, if I were to complete Calvino’s memos (not that he asked) I don’t think I’d choose consistency. From my vantage point, a decade into the shiny fresh millennium, I’d make the case for sustainability.
Sustainability is a term most often associated with the environment and ecology, used in conversations about protecting ecosystems we now know are fragile. It is a word concerned with balance and the tricky problem of not destroying something we love (like the planet, or literature) with the incredible ability of humans to screw it up. In dictionaries the word “sustain” is likened to phrases such as “to endure” or “strength or support physically and mentally.” It comes from the Latin word sustinere, which means “to hold up.” I do not think there is an aspect to literature that would not be served well with a little focus on endurance.
When Calvino began his memos technology was already rushing toward him, the invisible bits and bytes of computers already influencing the ways in which information moved. Now, full swing into the 21st century, literature is being delivered and profoundly shaped by e-readers, blogs and cell phones. It’s as if we have all become modern day Rip Van Winkles, closing our eyes to sleep for just a moment and opening them each morning to a brand new world. If literature is to be sustained, readers and writers must embrace those changes.
In his lecture on quickness, Calvino uses the metaphor of a traveling horse and literature’s ability to take a person on a journey. I don’t believe it matters which horse we take, so long as literature moves us. It is inevitable that as new electronic platforms become an everyday reality that someone is going to use them as a way to tell a story. Sustainability is not about rigid adherence to a single way of doing things, but rather about striving to make literature accessible to any sort of reader.
But sustainability isn't only about technology. It is also about publishing. In his argument for lightness, Calvino invokes the image of Perseus and his winged sandals, defeating Medusa by looking only at her reflection. To look into her in the face would turn him to stone. I think maybe writers should take the hint and start using mirrors to examine the snake haired head of publishing. No writer stuck in rock is sustainable.
Literature has never had so much competition. Our screens can bring us stories and novels, but it also brings television and music and a steady stream of photographs and videos. Literature exists in a world blanketed in images and sound and it can feel sometimes as though there are no quiet moments left in which a good story can breath. Every piece of writing needs to earn its readers. Calvino suggests that in the new millennium we will need exactitude and visibility. Precise language and a well-defined plan are what make up exactitude. Writing that is not smart and quick is going to lose readers to the sound bites that are, and are only a click away. So, too, will images for the sake of images. There is an endless stream of websites devoted to nothing more than images: images of baby animals, of humorous mishaps, of cakes or dolls or kittens. I believe this means that a reader now demands more of literature than perhaps she did fifty years ago. Literature will not sustain itself merely because it hasn’t disappeared, yet. So, too, sustainability is about intention.
I sometimes wonder what Calvino would have said about consistency. Would he have hoped for literature that holds together? Certainly, since he was an experimental writer himself, he would not have confused consistency with a resistance to newness. Perhaps he meant it more in line with reliability. As it is, the final value Calvino gives us is multiplicity. It also happens to be my favorite. He writes that this lecture is about “the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people and things of the world.” Each time I get to that line I can’t help but think of how it is the idea of connection that dominates everything I see changing in literature. I think, too, of publishing, with Medusa’s snakes going in a hundred different directions. I don’t think anyone really knows, even now, what the new millennium means for writers and literature. Except I know that there are values to honor in literature. Sustainability is mine. I hope other writers have their own to write in next to Calvino’s faded sixth idea. Near the closing of his introduction, Calvino admits he has little time for speculating on the end of literature, writing, “My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.” This, I think, is something we can all agree on.